Francesco Renga, a past winner of the Sanremo Music Festival, recently recorded a popular song in duet with Daniela Dessì and had this to say about a concert in which he will mix musical genres (emphasis added): “An audience that has never seen an opera, fascinated by the evening’s other guests—Lucio Dalla, Gianni Morandi, Riccardo Cocciante—will be able to understand what’s behind this opera that seems so distant, but in reality is a popular [means of] expression from a few decades ago. Opera was a kind of television ante litteram or like concerts by rock stars that we see now. Maria Callas was a diva just like U2 today.”
Giuseppina Grassi, a singer who taught Giuditta Pasta and was reportedly one of Napoléon’s lovers, is now remembered as la Callas delle Prealpi. There is a proposal to name a music library in Varese after Grassi.
The Maria Callas rubbish bins that you read about earlier are now a reality. Franco Zeffirelli, to his credit, deems “blasphemous” the juxtaposition of a pop-art image of Callas with “cigarette butts, dirty tissues, banana peels, and chewing gum.”
To stay on the subject of trash, Alfonso Signorini, the eminent gossipparo and author of a “novel” about Maria Callas, presided over an evening dedicated to her memory in Sirmione, during which excerpts from his magnum opus were declaimed by the actress Serena Autieri. MilanoWeb.com draws an unkind but telling contrast between José Saramago’s work and Signorini’s “festival of nullity.” (In Italian, this is called a stroncatura, and it’s a beautiful thing.)
I have read Signorini’s “novel” and consider it noteworthy only insofar as it may inspire a revival of book burning. From time to time, rumors fly that it will be adapted as a film. (Please, G-d, NO.)
Maria Callas’s “mysterious death” was examined on the Italian television show Top Secret, whose producers are apparently unfamiliar with the language of Dante and Michelangelo.
A costume that Maria Callas wore in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Norma is on exhibit in France. (The image above shows Callas with Simionato during the Norma run.)
In August 1956, [Franco] Zeffirellli wrote a rather curious note to my wife: “Dear Maria, yesterday evening Marlene Dietrich, one of your rabid admirers, spoke constantly of you. She says that in American hospitals they play your records continuously because they have discovered that your voice helps those who are ill, giving them confidence, calming them, and helping them to recover from what ails them. That is not surprising—we have known that for quite a while.” Giovanni Battista Meneghini, My Wife Maria Callas
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